67. Spencer Tracy as Henry Drummond
      Inherit the Wind (1960)

The media circus dramatized in Inherit the Wind—the 1925 Scopes “monkey trial,” in which a Tennessee high school instructor was accused of breaking a new law forbidding the teaching of evolution—was about a battle of ideas. And who better than gruff, decent, implacable Tracy to play the lawyer (based on Clarence Darrow) who exposes the inanity and hatred behind the law’s piety. Tracy’s star power, his sweaty shirt and leonine scowls, humanize director Stanley Kramer’s polemics and give the poetic lines of Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s play a clear and persuasive voice.

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